The present invention relates to an access control method for controlling the right of accessing and utilizing electronically distributed information and to an apparatus adapted to accessing and utilizing such information.
Currently, various pieces of information are distributed for sale electronically by way of data communication networks including the Internet and other satellite communication networks and recording media including CD-ROMs. Such pieces of information typically include the contents of newspapers, magazines, computer programs and recorded videos and audios.
However, there arises the serious problem of pirate copies of these contents that are illegally sold or leased to unauthorized third parties because the electronic contents can be copied without degradation. In particular, there is no effective way of prohibiting the act of making pirate copies if the contents are sold on a payment on delivery basis, in the case where the accounting is done only when the user has obtained the contents. While there may be legal means of confiscating and destructing pirate copies to be taken by the related authorities and that of suing the pirates for the lost profit to be taken by the infringed, such actions entails enormous time and cost so that a large number of pirate copies are actually on the market.
The pay-per-view system is an alternative proposed to bypass the problem of pirate copies. With this system, the contents of information are encoded before being delivered to the subscriber so as to prevent the user from utilizing the contents at his or her free will. For example, the user is prohibited from keeping the contents in a decoded state and the encoded contents can be decoded each time the user uses them, so that the accounting is done when the encoded contents are decoded. By adopting this method, the accounting can be done without fail because the encoded contents must be decoded when the user uses them.
A typical known pay-per-view system will be described by referring to FIG. 1 of the accompanying drawing.
The contents of information to be delivered are encoded by the information provider 1000. The encoded contents 1006 are accompanied by a condition package 1004 including the description on the encoding system, the charge per view, the authorization for printing and/or storage, if any, and other conditions on the use of the contents to complete the information 1002 to be delivered. The information 1002 is then delivered to the user terminal 2000 by way of one or more than one communication networks or a CR-ROM and stored in the memory section 2002 before it is retrieved.
When the user requests the user terminal 2000 to operate for displaying, printing or storing the information, the condition judging section 2004 judges if the requested operation is authorized or not by referring to the condition package 1004 of the information 1002. If authorized, it issues a command for carrying out the requested operation. Upon receiving the command, the decoding section 2006 decodes the encoded content 1006 and the decoded contents are appropriately displayed on the display screen of a display unit 2030 by a display processing section 2008, printed to produce a hard copy by a printing unit 2040 under the control of a printing processing section 2010 or stored in an external storage unit 2050 by a storage processing section 2012. If, on the other hand, the requested operation is not authorized, the condition judging section 2004 does not issue any command for carrying out the operation (or issues a command prohibiting the operation) and the request is refused.
Since the encoded contents are decoded whenever they are used so that the user is charged for each decoding operation of the decoding section 2006. Specific examples of charging methods that can be used for the system under consideration include the one for up-loading the record of decoding operations stored in the user terminal 2000 to the information provider 1000 and charging collectively at a later date and the one for providing the user with a pre-paid card that can be used at the user terminal 2000 for decoding operations.
With the above system, the condition package 1004 of the information 1002 delivered to the user terminal 2000 contains only “yes” or “no” for each operation. In other words, it controls the right of access to the delivered information for printing, storage and/or other purposes only in terms of “yes” and “no”. Additionally, the charge is uniform and invariable because this conventional pay-per-view system does not take changes in the value of the information and the mode of utilization thereof into consideration. Differently stated, this conventional system is adapted to contents such as those of movie films and fictions that are intended to be accessed by a large number of people and whose values do not significantly change with time.
However, such a pay-per-view system is not adapted to the contents of newspapers and magazines whose values can change significantly with time. The contents of newspaper and magazines are valuable when they are delivered for the first time because they are new and current. Then, they quickly change their values as they change their nature with time from news to records.
Thus, as described above, known conventional pay-per-view systems are not adapted to have flexibility in setting charges and access requirements for the contents of newspapers and magazines that can change the values in a short period of time because such systems do not take changes in the value of the information they provide and the mode of utilization thereof into consideration.